Hirshhorn Announces Landmark Exhibition “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” in Honor of Museum’s 50th Anniversary
Portrait of the artist Adam Pendleton. © Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus.
The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has announced “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen,” a landmark exhibition by Adam Pendleton. The artist will present new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work in the museum’s second-floor inner-ring galleries April 4, 2025, through Jan. 3, 2027. Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, D.C., highlights his unique contribution to contemporary American painting, while making use of the architecture of the museum and history of the National Mall.
“Introducing Adam Pendleton’s recent work in our 50th year is intentional,” said Melissa Chiu, Hirshhorn director. “His exhibition reflects the Hirshhorn’s mission as a 21st-century art museum that amplifies the voices of artists responding to history and place in real time. ‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ invites our almost 1 million annual visitors to think about the complexities of abstraction within the American experience, and its potential to forge associations among our shared past, present and future.”
“I am delighted to exhibit my work on the occasion of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary,” Pendleton said. “It presents a meaningful opportunity to engage, in subtle and poetic ways, with the museum’s architecture, position on the National Mall and legacy of showing significant abstract and conceptual work.”
Pendleton is known for his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings that he begins on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These visual experiments are at times carefully controlled and at others freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and then layers them using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing and the act of photography.
“Love, Queen” will feature Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” “Days,” “WE ARE NOT” and new “Composition” and “Movement” paintings. An encounter with any single work, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry. “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation,” the artist has stated.
The artist will also debut “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?),” a new video work that will be projected floor-to-ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multi-day encampment erected on the National Mall in the summer of 1968, considered to be the culmination of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Strobing in and out of darkness, the documentary material is interspersed with found footage and punctuated by flashes of geometric forms, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and representation. The film’s score by the multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe integrates a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds and drums.
In its totality, “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” will offer a powerful counterpoint to the collection surveys being presented in adjacent galleries. The exhibition is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan.
“It is an honor to invite Adam Pendleton to respond to the Hirshhorn’s singular architecture and location,” Hankins said. “‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ speaks to the vision of our anniversary—a period of simultaneous reflection and forward thinking, a space in which Pendleton has been operating for almost two decades.”
“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” will be accompanied by an exhibition catalog with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.
About Adam Pendleton
Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia)is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include “Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light,” mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); “To Divide By,” Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2023–2024); “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); “Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2021–2022); and “Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?” Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022).
Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; and Tate London.
About the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is the national museum of modern and contemporary art and a leading voice for 21st-century art and culture. Part of the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn is located prominently on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Its holdings encompass one of the most important collections of postwar American and European art in the world. The Hirshhorn presents diverse exhibitions and offers an array of public programs on the art of our time—free to all. The Hirshhorn Museum is open daily, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. (except Dec. 25). For more information, visit hirshhorn.si.edu. Follow the museum on Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube.
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